iRiver Story comes to the UK

iRiver has dropped us word that it's bringing its "Story" e-book reader to the UK. The South Korean manufacturer, famous for its MP3 players, says that the Story is "stepping up to challenge Sony's version and Amazon's new Kindle".

The reader has an e-ink display like many others, and can get 7000 page turns from one battery charge. It works with epub, pdf and txt formats, and also displays office files like doc, ppt and xls, and image formats like jpeg, bmp and gif - though images will only display in greyscale.

Interestingly the Story has a full QWERTY keyboard, with which the user can interact with an on-board diary and scheduler. It has a voice recorder and headphone jack, too, and a built-in speaker, which can play music or an audiobook, and continue playback while reading other things on the screen.

The device has 2GB of on-board flash memory, along with an SD card slot. That'll fit around 1500 ebooks, iRiver reckons. There's optional Wi-Fi, and it connects via USB 2.0 to your computer for loading content. It comes in matte white design only, and costs £230. It's available now.